Asustek Officially Unveils External Graphics Card for Notebooks.

Asustek Computer has officially revealed its external graphics card for mobile computers that is designed to enable more pleasant video gaming experience on notebooks. The product is unveiled for the second time already, but as it approaches the market, actual prospects and capabilities of the solution become less evident and appealing.

Asus ROG XG Station comes bundled with Nvidia GeForce 8600 GT-based graphics card inside as well as and Dolby Digital 5.1-channel audio logic to process audio. The device also features four USB ports, headphone and microphone jacks, built-in power adapter, volume controller as well as a screen that can display certain important parameters, such as system master volume, graphics chip’s clock-speed and temperature, frames per second information, fan speed and so on.

The external graphics adapter connects to notebooks using ExpressCard interface, which means that actual bandwidth available for its graphics processing unit is 250MB/s since ExpressCard interface connects to I/O controller of a computer using PCI Express x1 and USB interfaces. With such bandwidth restriction, even if a higher performance graphics card can be physically installed into ROG XG Station, its performance may be limited by interface capabilities.

While it is true that Asustek Computer's external graphics card for notebooks delivers considerably higher performance than integrated graphics processors, the GeForce 8600 GT will hardly satisfy modern gamers, unless they play previous-generation games. Unfortunately, upgrade capabilities of the XG Station are not clear.

Pricing of Asus “Republic of Gamers” XG Station was not announced, but if it is low enough, the product may become rather popular.

Discussion

Hi there, I wonder if that's applicable to my laptop hp540 model. and if it is yes then how that thing work & how much would that be? I'm not sure if it is already available here in Philippines. -gamer